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Wednesday, August 15, 2012

PAINTING OVER

I guess it was inevitable that once
these two met, their relationship would turn from unpleasant to
downright ugly. Widow Jane Leland Stanford was a rigid, humorless,
devoted temperance adherent who worshiped a vengeful God. She was
described by an acquaintance as a lady with “ an assured position in the social and
financial world." In other words, she was born with a stick up
her bum, and after the death of her husband, she exchanged the
wood for steel. Her antagonist, Ashley David Montague Cooper, was
what was once politely called a bohemian, but more accurately he was
a hedonist, an inveterate gambler, a constant drunk, a profligate
womanizer, and an atheist. He was also a very good painter. About the only
thing these two agreed upon was that if there was a hell, then A.D. Cooper going there in a hand cart. And it was fitting that their
relationship, such as it was, sank completely when it ran aground on
her rocks.

Jane Stanford's jewelry collection was
the guilt on the gilded age. During her lifetime she was known as
the queen of diamonds, and her private hoard remains famous to this day
because after her husband died in 1892 the United States government
slapped a $15 million tax lien (half a billion in 2012 dollars) on his
estate. Jane refused to pay even a portion of it,
even though the drawn out legal battle threatened to destroy the
memorial to her only child.

The story that Stanford University was
founded when Harvard rejected Leland Stanford Jr. is a myth. The
reality was that in 1884, when he was sixteen, the boy's doting
parents rewarded Junior with a “grand tour” of Europe. It was while exploring the temples of Greece that the boy contracted typhus, and he died
in Florence, Italy. The parents were heartbroken, and the little
comfort Jane's husband could offer was to tell her, “Now, all of
California will be our child”. He might have actually said that, as reason for founding the University that bares his name. Stanford University was supposed to be free for all qualified students,
women admitted equally with men, and to “qualify students for
personal success and direct usefulness in life.” And when the cold
hearted tax collectors prevented Jane from transferring money to the university, Jane
decided to sell her bling to keep the young university afloat. But
first, she thought it would be a good idea to memorialize her donation. Consider it a sales pitch.

She carefully arraigned the 34 diamond
studded tiaras, necklaces, cameos, bracelets, rings, ear rings,
lockets, watches, diadems and other assorted brick-a-brack, on a red
velvet piano cover, and had it photographed. And then, because the
resultant black and white image (above) did not do justice to the $100,000.00
($3 million today) collection, Jane decided to have the jewelery
painted. In the spring of 1898 she hired the most talented (and
expensive) painter she could find, Ashley David Montague Cooper. The
idea of donating what she intending on paying Cooper, to the cash
strapped university, never seems to have occurred to the lady.

By the time he was thirty, A.D. had
already painted the President's official portrait – U.S. Grant. But
his most famous painting was titled “Inquest on the Plains” and
depicted a small circle of American buffalo in the snow, surrounding
a dead Indian warrior. Subtle was not A.D.'s approach to art. Said a
critic, “When he was good, he was brilliant; when he was bad, he
was laughable.” Most of his darkly romantic western allegories
were hanging in the finest homes from New York City to San Francisco.
His studies of nude females, on the other hand, were hanging over
most of the bars between San Francisco and his home and studio in
Santa Cruz. He used them to pay off his own and his friend's bar
bills. A.D. had many friends and he was generous to a fault. And that
may have been why, when the messenger arrived from Jane Stanford,
A.D. agreed to the climb up Nobb Hill to her 50 room San Francisco mansion.

The lady had a few rules. First, while
he was working on the still-life of her jewelry, A.D. was to wear
formal dress. Secondly, he was to arrive at work sober, and since no
alcohol was allowed on the premises, he was to do no drinking on the
job. To be certain that her rules were adhered to Jane's personal
secretary, Bertha Berner, was to be in the room at all times. A.D.
readily agreed, so Jane showed him the piano cover she had draped her
jewelry upon, and the jewelry itself. To be honest, it did not seem
like that complicated a job, a bit like asking Leonardo Da Vinci to
paint a rumpus room. It wasn't as if the dowager was going to be
looming over A.D. while he painted. The hedonist must have wondered,
what could go wrong?.

What went wrong with A.D.'s plan was Bertha Berner. She
was a slightly younger version of Jane Stanford; her hair locked down
in a tight white bun, her bedroom and office adjacent to Jane's
bedroom, upstairs. By A.D.'s second session with the hoard, once it
was clear Bertha was not going away, A.D. snapped. According to
Bertha, ““he rose … made a deep bow with a flourish, drew a
flask from his pocket, and took a drink. Then he said, ‘Now you
watch me put a little fire into that sapphire!’” Bertha probably
reported this transgression to her mistress. But judging the work in
progress, Jane decided to keep A.D. on the job and Bertha watching
over the work..

Twice over the next few weeks A.D.
became so inebriated Bertha had to be send him home. But climbing
back aboard the wagon each time, he returned and forged ahead,
memorializing this six foot by four foot record of wealth in every precise detail, until he
had finished. A.D. was paid and discharged, and the painting hung in Mrs. Stanford's mansion's art gallery. For a few days it seemed the intrusion of
the reprobate had been a mere bump in the broad serene calm which
normally pervaded the Stanford mansion.

Then one morning a policeman knocked on
the mansion's front door, delivering disturbing news. The officer
reported to Bertha that a duplicate of the jewelery painting, this
one on redwood, had appeared in the front window of a saloon in San
Jose. And worse, the items depicted were prominently identified on
the canvas to be the property of Jane Leland Stanford. It was like an advertisment for any theives looking for a new target. A.D. had even
showed the chutzpa to have boldly signed the copy.

What Jane Stanford supposedly said was
recorded by her faithful servant Bertha. "What a sad thing,”
she supposedly said. “All that talent, dulled by John Barleycorn.” She thereupon dispatched a servant and the police officer via the San
Francisco, San Jose, Monterrey Railroad to retrieve the copy of her
painting. A little cash smoothed the transfer of the art from the
saloon's window into the servant's hands, and it can be assumed that
some silver also made its way into the police officer's pocket. Three
hours later the copy was in Jane's hands, and promptly destroyed. And
in any normal household that would have been the end of the entire
affair.

It was not ended for Jane because,
first, as a temperance supporter she had been made a laughing stock
in front of her Nobb Hill sophisticates. And secondly, when Jane
traveled to London to sell her jewels, she learned the unpleasant
lesson all jewelry owners must eventually learn, about the difference
between an insurance value of diamonds and the market value.
Diamonds, it turns out, are for forever only until you try to sell
them. Jane found buyers for only about ten of the jewels in the
painting. Still that was enough to endow the University with $20, 000
a year to buy new books for the library. The fund is still being used
for that purpose today, and is called “The Jewel Fund”. Also
immediately upon her return to San Francisco Jane had A.D.'s original
painting taken down from her gallery and placed in storage. The queen
of diamonds found it too painful anymore to gaze upon her jewels.
The next year, 1898, the Supreme Court ruled for the Stanford estate,
and Jane no longer had to sell her diamonds.

A.D.'s original painting stayed in the
basement of the Stanford Nobb Hill mansion until Jane's death in
1905. The old lady died while hiding out in Hawaii. She was convinced
that someone was trying to poison her. The Hawaiian police suspected
strychnine, but most people considered that nonsense. Jane had left
Bertha $15,000 ( half a million today) and a house. Meanwhile the
vast majority of Jane Stanford's estate, about $40 million (over a
billion in today's dollars) went to the institution which bears her
only son's name, Leland Stanford Junior University.

Ashley David Montague Cooper continued
on his road to perdition, unimpeded by public disapproval or personal
regret until 1919, when at the age of 62 “grey-haired, but
stalwart and erect” the old reprobate married 36 year old Charlotte
George. The couple shared five happy years together until A.D. died
of tuberculosis, in September of 1924. Presumably he was exhausted. His painting of "Mrs. Stanford's Jewel Collection" was brought out of hiding after her death. Now considered "one of the most extraordinary still-lives of our time" it hangs in Cantor Arts Center on the Stanford University campus.